


Stained

by PenguinofProse



Series: S4 Time Jump AUs [14]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Clarke Escapes the Praimfaya, Charcoal, Drawing, Episode: s04e13 Praimfaya - Time Jump, F/M, Post-Episode: s04e13 Praimfaya, Protective Bellamy, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25534855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenguinofProse/pseuds/PenguinofProse
Summary: Clarke makes it to space with the others at the end of S4. Bellamy is worried about her. A little light angst with a fluffy ending.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Series: S4 Time Jump AUs [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1764070
Comments: 20
Kudos: 200





	Stained

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to another request fulfilled! We're starting off at the end of S4 but with Clarke making it safely to the Ring. Huge thanks to Stormkpr for betaing. Happy reading!

Bellamy thinks nothing of it, when Clarke shows up for breakfast with charcoal dust on her hands, that first morning on the Ring. She likes drawing, and she has all the time in the world to draw, now, for the next five years.

So he doesn't ask questions. He simply pulls her in for a rather exuberant hug, nuzzling into her hair, allowing his lips to ghost ever so gently against the skin of her neck. He figures a celebratory hug or two is acceptable, in this moment. They're both still breathing, they have successfully outrun Praimfaya. It's more than he could have dreamed of, only yesterday, as he stood at the door of the rocket waiting desperately for her to make it back from the tower.

She seems to agree that it's a time for hugging, as she squeezes him tight and drops her head onto his chest.

"You doing alright?" He asks, because that's what he does.

"Yeah, you?"

"Great." To his surprise, he finds that it is the truth. His sister is trapped beneath the ground, back on Earth, but they'll meet again. And in the meantime, Clarke is safe in his arms. "We made it." He adds, still hugging her.

She laughs, a slightly hysterical sound. "Yeah. We did."

"I was worried you wouldn't make it, for a moment, there." He admits. "You gave me a fright."

"I'm fine. I'm here. Still breathing." She reminds him, pulling away from the hug at last as their friends start to arrive for breakfast.

It isn't until much later, that night, shedding his clothes at the end of the day, that he notices the dark fingerprints on the back of his T shirt and remembers the charcoal.

…...

Clarke must be drawing a lot. That's what Bellamy has decided, by the end of the first week. She always seems to have those same stained fingers, every time he's seen her since they got here.

He supposes it's not necessarily a bad thing. Art can be a kind of therapy, he's heard, and heaven knows they could all use therapy, now, if such a thing as a psychiatrist could be found floating through space. So it is that he decides he will try to support her in using drawing to cope with everything that has happened.

Supporting Clarke is basically his calling in life, after all.

He finds a couple of sketchbooks in an old storage closet. It's a productive search all round – he finds himself a copy of the Odyssey, too, which he supposes is about the closest thing he's ever found to a healthy coping mechanism. He's pretty sure his habit of having large amounts of casual sex when he's not doing so well doesn't count as _healthy,_ and anyway, he always feels less like doing that when Clarke's around.

"Here, I got you something." He offers, that evening, as people begin to drift towards the dining room for supper. He'd have liked to have gone and sought her out in her room this afternoon, but that doesn't seem to be a thing they do, in this new life on the Ring. He's barely seen her aside from meal times, and he doesn't much like that.

She looks confused as she reaches out to take the sketchbooks. "What's all this?" She asks, brow quirked.

"Sketchbooks." He points out, although she can presumably see that they are sketchbooks. "I noticed you'd been drawing a lot. Thought you might be running out of paper."

"Oh. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Thanks, Bellamy."

Her smile does not reach her eyes, and it worries him. Worrying about Clarke – that's another of his hobbies, he notes tiredly.

…...

She keeps drawing, and the charcoal stains spread. They're not confined to her hands, now – there's dark dust clinging to the creases of her elbows, scattered over her face, and even, bizarrely, staining her knees.

Bellamy wants to do something about it. He wants to at least suggest that showering sometimes might be a good idea. But he doesn't want to do anything to breach the sanctity of her drawing. This is clearly something very important to her – almost a ritual, he thinks. She spends all her time in her room, appearing only for meals.

He misses her, but he mustn't tell her that, mustn't demand that she changes her behaviour on his account. If this is what she needs to do to heal, then that's fine.

She's late for supper, today, and there's a big smear of charcoal across her cheek. Bellamy can't take his eyes off it through the whole meal – or maybe he can't take his eyes off _her_.

She offers to help clear up after they've eaten, and he actually breathes a sigh of relief. He can't remember the last time she voluntarily spent time outside her room. The two of them carry dishes to the sink and get on with washing, and Bellamy tries to remember how to make conversation with his closest friend.

"These ration packs are so bad I almost can't wait for the algae to be ready." He offers. It's a poor attempt, but it seems better than staying silent.

To his relief, she meets him half way. "Yeah. You know, I really miss venison."

"I could even go for some panther right now."

"Too far." She teases, but the look in her eyes is not quite right. "Nothing is as bad as that panther meat."

He figures he's safe to move onto the next step, now. They've had a quick friendly chat, and she's even tried to engage in humour.

He wets a finger at the tap, and wipes it gently over the charcoal stain on her cheek. Charcoal is a stubborn substance, it turns out, and it takes him a good couple of tries, rubbing at her skin a little, until it's gone.

That's when it occurs to him that he should maybe have explained what he was doing before spending several seconds touching his good platonic friend's face.

"You had a little charcoal, just here." He tells her, hand still resting on her cheek, because apparently he's incapable of behaving sensibly around this woman.

"Thanks." She tells him, smiling a shaky smile.

Maybe it's going to be OK, he tells himself optimistically. Maybe the drawing really is working, really is helping her to process her trauma.

Maybe she'll leave her room a little more often in future.

…...

She doesn't.

It turns out that the evening of dishes and charcoal-stained cheeks was a fluke. Clarke continues to stay in her room apart from mealtimes, and Bellamy resigns himself to it. He thinks that giving in and accepting it is the right thing to do. If she needs to spend all her time drawing in order to heal, then that's fine with him.

He just hopes that's the right call. He hopes he's not letting her down, because he really hates letting Clarke down.

…...

Bellamy doesn't feel great.

That shouldn't be a surprise, of course. He left his precious sister underground on a burning planet. He's lost too many friends to count, and killed countless enemies more. There's a number of reasons why he might be feeling low, and sort of _confused_ , and prone to snapping angrily at his friends for no good reason.

The thing is, he didn't feel like this, a month ago. When they first arrived on the Ring, he felt so optimistic. He remembers hugging Clarke that first morning with hope in his heart, and thinking that maybe things could be good for them, now, at peace and with only six other people to take care of.

It's stupid, but he literally feels worse than he did when the world was ending. Sure, he was worried then, but in this moment, as he seriously contemplates punching the wall just to take his frustration out on something other than his friends, he knows that he was coping much better, at that point, than he is with this peace and leisure. In fact, the last time he felt like this was when Pike was on the rise in Arkadia, he's pretty sure. He remembers being so hurt and angry and confused at Clarke leaving, and then losing Gina, and wanting to be able to rely on Clarke to support him, but then she decided to stay in Polis.

That's when he understands it, all at once, in a flash of insight he cannot believe it has taken him so long to reach.

He _does_ have a healthy coping mechanism. His healthy coping mechanism is talking to Clarke. Talking to her about his mother, and his failures, and his guilt, or just talking to her to enjoy her company and pass the time of day. And that's why he feels thoroughly and completely _crap_ – he's been so busy respecting her need to lock herself in her room and draw, that he hasn't tried to ask for what he needs.

He's never been one for thinking things through, as such. He's got Clarke for that. So as soon as he's worked out what his problem is, he sets out down the hallway towards her room to fix it. He doesn't need to make a big deal out of it, he tells himself. He'll just knock on the door of her room, and say he misses hanging out with her, and ask if maybe she wants to take a walk around the Ring when she next has a few minutes to spare from her drawing.

He's just rounding the last corner before her room when Clarke herself approaches from the other direction, visibly distracted, and walks straight into him.

"Sorry." She offers.

"Hey." He greets her, almost at the same time.

There's a beat of silence. Bellamy stands there and looks at Clarke's face. She's got some charcoal on her ear today, and sort of smudged out from there over the side of her face. If he didn't know better he'd say the only way she could get a mark like that is from leaning on a drawing, perhaps. Has she maybe been staying up late then falling asleep onto her sketchbook?

"Are you OK?" He asks her, cautiously.

"Yeah. Yeah, fine. You?"

He clears his throat, and begins his ill-thought-out speech. "Yeah. Fine, thanks. I just – I realised we haven't hung out much recently, you and me. And I guess I miss it. I miss _you_. So I was wondering if maybe you want to take a walk or something, next time you have some time to spare from your drawing?"

To his surprise, she hugs him. She steps forward, and wraps her charcoal-dusted arms about his waist, and squeezes him hard. He's pretty convinced she's ruining this neat tan-coloured T shirt he's wearing, but he doesn't like to argue. He's missed hugging Clarke. So he wraps his arms around her in turn, and holds her tight, and rests his cheek on the top of her head.

"I'd like that." She murmurs, still embracing him. "You want to go now?"

"Now?" He brightens considerably. This is all going much better than expected.

"Yeah. Let's go."

He pauses, clears his throat a little. "Do you maybe want to wash your hands, first?" He asks, trying to keep his tone light. He doesn't want her to think he's judging her. "And you have charcoal here." This time, he simply points at her face, and does not allow himself to wipe the mark away.

She looks down at her arms, and seems confused to find them stained. "Yeah. Good idea. Sorry, I get so distracted when I'm drawing. Silly of me." She gives a laugh which sounds nothing like her usual laugh.

He frowns. "Everything OK, Clarke? Where were you headed when I bumped into you?"

"Oh, just the bathroom." She shrugs.

He's not sure how much he believes that. He saw her head towards the bathroom after lunch, and that was less than an hour ago. But he's here to support Clarke, not ask difficult questions, so he simply waits for her to wash the charcoal off her arms and tries to decide where they might go on their walk.

…...

They make a habit of walking together, in the days and weeks that follow. It's a small thing, just an hour or so after lunch, circling around and around and around this cage in the sky. But it's enough that Bellamy feels calmer, now, and distinctly more _balanced_.

They talk a bit about what's really bothering them. Bellamy mentions the fear of leaving his sister behind without him, and Clarke reassures him that Indra and Abby and Miller and Kane will take good care of her. Clarke doesn't say much about her own troubles, and when he presses gently, the most he manages to get is that she didn't much care for the person she became, on the ground.

That's a shame, he decides. Because personally, he thinks the Clarke he knew on the ground was pretty awesome, but he's not sure she's ready to hear that.

…...

So Bellamy is feeling rather better in himself, but he's still worried sick about Clarke. They've been taking their tours of the Ring together for a month or so now, and he hasn't managed to work out what's bothering her in any more detail than that she loathes the things she had to do on Earth. Meanwhile, the charcoal stains are still spreading, sticking to her clothes, even gracing her eyelashes, on her bad days.

He's got a bit braver about helping her out with that, though, since they started hanging out more.

Today, for example, he seems to have ended up wiping charcoal dust of her collarbone, brushing at the place where the neckline of her shirt gives way to bare skin.

"There. You're all good." He tells her when he's done, trying to keep his facial expression to a friendly grin rather than an adoring smile.

"Thanks. Are you OK?" He jolts back from her, confused. Isn't he supposed to be asking her that?

"I'm fine, Clarke. I'm great."

"You've been looking a little stressed." She offers, comfortable diving straight into the difficult questions as ever.

"I'm OK, really." He swallows. If she can do it, he can match her. "I guess I look stressed because I'm worried about you. I get that drawing is important to you and all, but sometimes I wonder if spending all that time alone is the best thing while you're trying to process everything that happened on Earth."

She looks up at him sharply, eyes narrowed. She seems surprised to hear him open that particular topic, but it's a mark of how desperate he is to take care of her.

"I'm doing OK, Bellamy. Really. I'm actually doing better since we started hanging out more." She tries for a smile.

"You sure?"

"Yeah." She sucks in a breath. "You don't need to worry about me, I promise. But – is it wrong of me to be kind of grateful that you are?"

He pulls her in for a hug, because hugging is what they do best.

…...

Bellamy tries to live a normal life, around his preoccupation with Clarke's wellbeing. He continues with his self-appointed task of sorting through all the assorted items left behind in storage closets up here. He turns up a few useful bits and pieces – some medical equipment, and some parts that are useful to Raven – but he also finds a couple more sketchbooks which he gives to Clarke.

He's on his way to a new storage facility today, one he hasn't searched before. It's right over the other side of the Ring from the bedrooms and dining room their new life revolves around, so he's surprised when he hears footsteps in the next hallway.

He leaves his task and peers around the corner. To his surprise, Clarke of all people is walking away down the corridor in the general direction of her room.

If she's going home, now, where the hell has she come from?

He's aware that stalking the best friend he's a little in love with is not appropriate behaviour. But he does it anyway, because he's worried about her, OK? He doesn't quite buy that line she fed him the other day about feeling better since they started hanging out more. Even if it's partly true, he cannot help but notice that the charcoal stains are still spreading.

He sets out down the hallway in the direction she must have come from. He's not sure what he's looking for – a door left ajar, perhaps? A room in disarray? A broken lock, or trashed keypad, or some other sign that Clarke has been somewhere she shouldn't have been?

He may not have known what he should be looking for, but he knows the instant he finds it.

At the end of the hallway, in a forgotten alcove that leads to nowhere, Clarke has been drawing. He knows it's her, and he puts the pieces together right away – she told him, months ago, about drawing in solitary. It's like she's done the same thing, here, starting out in a dark recess where no one would think to look but then spreading, out of control, down the corridor, until she's covered half the length of it.

It's like walking through a tunnel of Clarke's memories.

He recognises a lot of the scenes, picked out in charcoal against the grey walls. There's a lot of pictures of Lexa – that's surely no surprise. There's Wells, of course, and an older man who bears a strong resemblance to Clarke around the eyes. Her father, perhaps.

There are plenty of people she didn't love, here, too. There's Emerson, cold eyes haunting him as he walks further along the hallway. There's Maya, and even though the image is drawn only in black charcoal somehow Bellamy can just see the pastel knitwear and the fire in her eyes. There are Titus and Gustus, both Cage and Dante Wallace, and at least three different depictions of Anya.

Most of all, though, he recognises himself. Himself laughing and biting into an apple, right back at the start of their story. Then here he is leaning over her, as he writes her name on the list. There he is on the stairs, bidding her to make it a kill shot.

Him at the door of the rocket, desperate to see her run back to him in time to live.

He gets it, now. He gets everything she has let slip about not liking who she became on the ground. Because this hallway is a journal of everything that happened to them on Earth, as far as he can tell. It shows perfectly, he thinks, the way that the good and the bad were intertwined. There's one pair of portraits that really gets him – Jasper, head shaved, eyes heavy with grief, right next to a sketch of himself in a rubber suit, smiling across at her in the rover.

He needs to go to Clarke. He needs to find her _now_. It doesn't occur to him, even for a moment, to hide this and pretend he has not intruded on her privacy. She needs someone to tell her that it's OK to have this swirling mess of emotions and memories wreaking havoc in her head.

Most of all, she needs to know that he's a fan of Clarke Griffin, no matter what she has had to do.

…...

He knocks on her door. He hasn't done that since they got here, so busy respecting her privacy that he didn't dare. But he thinks he's probably past the point of privacy, after what he just saw.

"Who is it?" She sounds startled, he thinks.

"Me. Bellamy." He clarifies, in case she cannot recognise his voice by now.

There's a pause. He shifts his weight awkwardly from foot to foot, clasps his hands at his hips in the hope of reminding himself that he's a brave soldier, and he can deal with this.

"Come in." She calls at last. He wasn't expecting that – he was expecting her to want to come outside to meet him, not invite him into her space.

He opens the door, and enters.

His first impression is that her room is like the hallway. There are drawings everywhere, so on a superficial level it's the same. She's covered every inch of space – even the floor – and right now she's shading something he cannot make out, right in the corner.

But then he realises that this is nothing like the hallway. The drawings there were chaotic, a mess, a mixture of the good and the bad. Here, inside her room, it's like she's tried to create for herself a happy place, he thinks. He sees a sketch of Lexa sitting up in bed, and averts his gaze sharply. There's Raven, grinning that sharp grin of hers, Jasper eating chocolate cake, Abby smiling in relief.

There are more portraits of himself than he ever expected to see in his entire life.

"You could have told me." He says. It's perhaps not the most sensitive place to start, but those are the words that are on the tip of his tongue. "I would have understood, really. I would have _wanted_ to understand."

She nods. "I know. That's why I invited you in here now."

It is his turn to nod. He can see she has a point. "I found the hallway."

She sighs, sits back on her heels. "I'm not proud of that one."

He doesn't entirely understand her, but he presses on. "You should be, Clarke. They're beautiful drawings apart from anything else."

"No, I mean – they're the memories I'm not proud of. The confusing ones, or the painful ones. The ones I didn't know what to do with." She breathes deeply and continues. "I started out in here, drawing the good memories. The things that bring me joy. It kind of worked for me, when I was in the Skybox and I drew Earth. So I thought that maybe, if I drew the good things about the time on the ground, I could chase away the thoughts of the bad things." She gestures to the wall, runs a finger over a drawing of his brow, smudging the charcoal into a new soft curve.

"But it wasn't working?" He guesses.

"Not really. The difficult memories were still there. So I knew I needed to work them out, too. That's when I started the hallway."

"Did it help?"

She frowns. "I don't know whether the drawing made it better. I think it helped me process it, so I could tell you about it."

He doesn't know how to answer that. As far as he can remember, she's told him very little indeed, but if it helped her at all he's glad to hear it.

"I'm running out of space in here now." She continues. "So I guess that's good, right? I've got more happy memories than I thought I did. Look, I actually started one of the sketchbooks you gave me." She holds it out to him, open at the first page.

He doesn't know what he was expecting. Lexa, probably, or else Wells or Abby. But there, on the first page of her new happy memories book, is his face. More specifically, he recognises himself in a stolen Azgeda disguise, the day he crossed a battlefield in search of her.

"This is a happy memory?" He asks, a little puzzled. He remembers failing to save her, and getting stabbed in the leg for his trouble.

"Yeah. It is for _me_ , anyway. I hadn't seen you for months, I thought you'd be angry with me for leaving. And then you dropped everything to come looking for me anyway. I – it made me feel like I _mattered_ to you, you know? I couldn't believe you cared about me enough to want to find me even after I'd left you."

He shuffles his feet a little, self-conscious. "You matter to me." He confirms, feeling inadequate.

"Thanks."

He gathers his courage. There's something he's been trying to find the right moment to say for a while, now, and he figures this is as good a time as any.

"I liked who you were on the ground. You keep saying that you didn't like who you became. And I get that, you had to do some horrific things. But what you do isn't the same as who you are. And – you're _good_ , Clarke. On the ground or in space, you're good."

"You mean that?" She sounds surprised, he thinks. She always seems shocked that anyone might actually like her, value her for who she is as a person.

"Yeah." He has never been more sure of anything in his life.

"Then I guess I have a new thing to put in my book of happy memories." She tells him, with a hesitant smile. "I like who you are on the ground and in space as well, you know that?"

He nods, jaw tense. One of the things that has always confused him about his relationship with Clarke is this funny way they have of circling around their feelings, getting close to opening up but never quite managing it, talking about _caring_ and _mattering_ and _liking_ , but never once mentioning love.

He clears his throat and treads a little closer to that forbidden subject. "Just so we're clear, Clarke, you're – you're really important to me. And if you need to keep drawing in hallways that's fine by me. But do you think you could have a go at talking to me about it, as well? And maybe washing the charcoal off your knees sometimes? I worry about you."

She nods, and he notes that, while he was talking, she seems to have returned to her obscure patch of shading. He's a little frustrated with her, if he's being honest. He just made it half way to spilling his heart out to her, and she's still preoccupied with her damn drawing.

Then she starts to speak, and his frustration flees.

"Did you notice anything about the drawings, Bellamy?" She asks.

"What do you mean?"

"Did you maybe notice that there were more drawings of some people than others?" She asks, tone carefully controlled.

He swallows. "Yeah. I guess I did. I mean – it seems like there are a lot of pictures of me in here." A lot of portraits of his face, in her happy space. He allows himself to hope that, maybe, that might mean something.

"I was wondering how you feel about that?" She asks, staring very carefully at that little patch of shading.

He hesitates. This is an important question, and it deserves a well-considered answer. He needs to be honest with her, but he's still not sure if they're allowed to talk openly about love.

"I think it's only fair." He says in the end. "I don't have a room full of drawings, because I can't draw. I just have the stories that live in my head, and most of my happy stories are stories that have you in. So I guess it seems fair that I'm in your happy memories too." He forces himself to press on, tone as light as he can manage. "It makes me hope that maybe I'm not completely out of my mind to think we'd be good together." He swallows, hands still gripping his hips, and waits for her verdict.

She doesn't answer him in words. She answers him by abandoning that damn corner of her sketch at long last, and flinging her arms around his neck, and pressing her lips to his. He's certainly not arguing with that development, but he is surprised, so it takes him a moment to relax into the embrace and really enjoy it, kissing her back, moving his hands from his hips to her waist.

She pulls away too soon for his liking, and looks up at him.

"We _are_ good together. Haven't we already proved that?"

He laughs a little. "You're right. But I meant – like this."

She nods, brow quirked. "We seem to be good like this, too."

"Yeah." He swallows. This is a happy moment, and he is happy, of course he is. But he's not so naive as to think that a bit of kissing can wash away every trauma they lived through on the ground. "I meant it, Clarke. What I said earlier, about being here for you if you need to talk."

"Yeah. Same to you, too." She presses a couple of kisses to his neck. "Can we maybe go to my hallway together some time? Would that be OK? And talk about some of the difficult memories and try to sort out the good and the bad?"

"And maybe work out that doing horrible things is not the same as being a horrible person?" He prompts her, even as he clasps her waist tightly.

She leans in to kiss him for a moment. "Yeah. But I think maybe we could work that out later. Maybe there's something else we should do first."

He laughs, and keeps kissing her. This is what he should have done, he thinks, that time they sat beneath a tree, high and exhausted, and he asked her if they could work it out later. He can't believe it's taken the two of them so long to get to this point.

But they're here now, together, Clarke's charcoal-dusted fingers tugging at his hair, and that's definitely more happiness than he deserves.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
